


what am i defending now (i'm in exile seeing you out)

by AK Lecter (RUNNFROMTHEAK)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Codependency, Dark Will Graham, Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Hurt Hannibal Lecter, I have so many emotions about this scene okay, M/M, POV Will Graham, Post-Break Up, Reminiscing, Sad cannibal noises, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter, aka rejection number 3, it's the mic drop scene, this is a sad one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:02:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27844939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RUNNFROMTHEAK/pseuds/AK%20Lecter
Summary: The unspoken sentiment is shared between them, one neither of them is up to addressing.He’s stopped, so our conversations will stop. Again.“Your family was on his itinerary…” Hannibal looks away, face creased with humanity, and unwound seams he can’t repair fast enough. “…safe now.”Acheis the only word Will can use to describe the way his heart clenches at that soft admission, as painful as it is familiar. He shouldn’t feel anything but relief at it, at the concept of Molly and Wally and home and no more killers, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even find calmness in it, just numbness colored by an ache.“You can go home again, if there’s any point.”
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 72





	what am i defending now (i'm in exile seeing you out)

**Author's Note:**

> Here's what inspired this quick piece: [Exile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNwe-i1A3ts)
> 
> it's super beautiful so definitely go check it out! Please enjoy the angst!!!!

Hannibal is casually leaning against the wall as Will enters the room silently, indignant anger once again lost to reminiscence. He’d tried desperately to cling to it, to cling to the broken image Molly made with her blonde hair as a messy halo and white hospital sheets as her wings, to cling to the mistrust shining in his _~~not his~~_ son’s eyes as he’d told Will to _kill_ , to cling to the arrowhead ripping into his heart like some recreation of the Wound Man in the face of Hannibal’s manipulations and tender ministrations once again.

He thinks of their first conversation, as he so often does. Forts and walls and memories and eye contact.

 _Not fond of eye contact, are you?_ The Doctor Lecter of his memory, one not yet warmed and softened by affections and murderous consummations of the unconsummatable, asks mockingly.

But their roles seem to have reversed, for Will is the one left staring at Hannibal’s side-profile, the unscarred jut of cheekbones as sharp as his tongue, the aristocratic curve of his chin and nose. He’s careful with where his eyes linger, wary of Hannibal’s own inevitable callouts, but Hannibal doesn’t look at him. Not yet.

“I was rooting for you, Will,” he says predictably, ever the devil in his corner and on his shoulder and in his mind, the very voice his darkness manifests as. He softens a bit as he opens his mouth again, hesitancy a tone Will doesn’t know from him outside of that final dinner where everything should have gone differently before the bloodshed but hadn’t.

 _We could leave. Tonight_.

Doctor Lecter’s imagined offer isn’t soft as it had been before, it’s acerbic. Spit from his mouth as though he can’t bear to have it linger on his tongue any longer. An echo of grief long worked through passes through him, but it is (thankfully) not enough to resurrect Abigail’s specter.

“It’s a shame.”

It would seem they’re both at a loss, reunited with a ticking clock on the inevitable end to it. To their conversations. Will looks beyond Hannibal rather than at him, finding difficulty in the honesty of the unstitched person suit weakly draped over the older man’s true thoughts and feelings, finding difficulty in the thread-bare veil, more a pretense than a fort or wall. Hannibal’s vulnerable to him, and Will can see it in that moment, no matter how much he wishes he couldn’t, wishes he didn’t understand why Hannibal’s maroon gaze stares up at the stars beyond the room of his cage – _I looked up at the night sky there. Orion above the horizon and, near it, Jupiter. I wondered if you could see it, too. I wondered if our stars were the same_.

It’s a pain he reflects, worse than the killers inside his head and the shambles of pretended normality he desperately clings to. The air tastes of Hannibal’s ache, left unanswered by Will, and he makes no move to alter that.

Will remains silent, knowing Hannibal will have more to say, instead savoring the quiet for a moment, absent of the ever-present hum his mind takes anywhere outside of Hannibal’s company.

“You came all this way and you didn’t get to kill anybody.” That’s closer to Doctor Lecter, robbed of that fragile avoidance from the previous sentiments, more manipulative. He wants a reaction, like a child poking a bee’s hive with a stick.

“Only consolation is Dr. Chilton. Congratulations for the job you did on him, I admired it enormously.”

Hannibal’s eyes darken as they meet his, person-suit slowly constricting back around his rawness. Like a suture on a stab wound; ugly and efficient. His smirk drips projected condescension with genuine pride a softer undercurrent he can tell Hannibal resents.

Hannibal delivers each minute strike elegantly, unwinding the tenuous bridge over the chasm between them bit by bit. It’s worn down and weak now, unvisited, and heavily mourned. There’s a feral aftertaste to Hannibal, even now. It lingers in his eyes, the imperfect posture, the paled skin, the way the pantsuit doesn’t cling to him the way his previous wardrobe had. He’d stepped closer with every word, and Will barely registers it, too enraptured in all the horrible things he sees and remembers in Hannibal’s eyes.

“What a _cunning_ boy you are.”

It sounds like an insult and compliment wrapped into one tempting package Will’s smart enough not to unwrap, furrowed brow more of a mask than a genuine reaction.

“Are you accusing me of something?”

Hannibal blinks once, features slack before pulling tight, caught between amusement and genuine disappointment. They can’t read each other as well as they once had; Hannibal doesn’t see the lies Will colors his expressions with for their audience that doesn’t fully trust him (not that anyone does now, not even Hannibal).

“Does the enemy inside of you agree with the _accusation_?” Hannibal inquires, voice sharper than before, roughened with his accent, “Even a little bit?”

He wonders if it’s hope or masochism that allows Hannibal to ask these questions, wonders if it’s his longing or Hannibal’s that has those eyes dart down to the wedding ring on Will’s hands. A barrier born more out of the desire for an ideal than the desire of the reality.

 _I have a concept of you, just as you have a concept of me_ , Doctor Lecter recites tartly, the ghost of a sensation around _that_ band. His skin itches uncomfortably, a light burn where the metal touches him, and were it not for the implications Hannibal would pick on from the action, Will might have taken it off. He knows now that the imago Hannibal carries with him of Will wears no wedding band. At least, not one from Molly Foster. Will has wisely chosen to drown any thoughts or feelings that sentiment invokes in his quiet stream, avoiding the inevitable self-analysis he’s been putting off for years.

Bedelia hadn’t helped. She’d only offered those reactions air, oxygen as fuel, and room to fester, grow. Like an algal bloom amongst the clean waters. Toxic and unsustainable. He and Hannibal had never been sustainable.

“I came back to stop the Dragon.” Will keeps his voice neutral, but it softens in the end, a consequence of what he doesn’t want to interpret from Hannibal’s steady gaze. “He’s stopped.”

The unspoken sentiment is shared between them, one neither of them is up to addressing.

_He’s stopped, so our conversations will stop. Again._

“Your family was on his itinerary…” Hannibal looks away, face creased with humanity, and unwound seams he can’t repair fast enough. “…safe now.”

 _Ache_ is the only word Will can use to describe the way his heart clenches at that soft admission, as painful as it is familiar. He shouldn’t feel anything but relief at it, at the concept of Molly and Wally and home and no more killers, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even find calmness in it, just numbness colored by an ache.

“You can go home again, if there’s any point.”

Will can. He can go home to his dogs and his wife and his _~~not his~~_ son. He can go home to boat motors and repairs and soft kisses and comfort and the constant hum of their feelings and essences brushing against his carefully constructed forts. It’s a predictability he’d needed after everything, a routine he’d craved more than anything else he can admit to, but it doesn’t feel like _his_ when Hannibal voices the possibility. It feels like a defeat, a surrender, a terrible boredom he indulges in because that’s _exactly what it is_.

He knows his life there perfectly. He knows that Will Graham perfectly. He doesn’t know the Will Graham Hannibal aches for; only the responding ache the darker reflection of him feels just as keenly. There’s a comfort in the known, but there’s also a stagnancy in it.

“Is there any point?” Hannibal whispers, voice soft and heavy, spoken around the lump Will can’t see so much as _feel_ the ghost sensation of in his throat. It’s that same way he’d sounded years before, in a chair next to Will’s bed with a book full of fruitless attempts to make up for their past. For _Hannibal’s_ past, Will corrects. Not theirs.

_Every crime of yours…feels like one I’m guilty of. Not just Abigail’s murder, every murder…stretching backward and forward in time._

Behind closed eyes, he can see the wendigo’s antlers cast over them both, branches intertwined to the point of being inseparable. They’d separated by Will’s words, cutting them both deeper than Will had known possible, deeper than the smile across his abdomen, and remained so for years. Years where Will built walls out of people, denials out of affections and hobbies. He’d reconstructed himself entirely to distance himself from the guilt, the desires colored by blood and breath and radiance. It feels pointless here, before Hannibal’s intent gaze that searches for fragments of lure and desire Will had unearthed before. He feels naked, bared before the man he should hate but can’t.

Suddenly, it’s too difficult to look directly at Hannibal, be in front of his scrutiny, so he looks away. He steps a few paces to the side, unsurprised when Hannibal mirrors him like the caged beast he’s been reduced to for Will. _By_ Will.

“I like my life there.”

It’s the simple answer. The _simplest_ answer. But like is not love, and contentment is not tantamount to happiness or genuine desire for the continuation of it. For every settled impulse and calmed thought, a darker counterpart burns behind it. A smokescreen of conflictions, most of which are suppressed to favor the more socially acceptable.

 _We could leave now,_ Doctor Lecter mocks, nostrils full of Freddie Lounds’ unmistakable perfume and heart full of the secrets separating the two of them completely. _Tonight. Feed your dogs, leave a note for Alana, and never see her or Jack again. Almost polite._

The worst part of surviving hadn’t been the physical pain, the strains of his scar, and dizziness from blood loss. It hadn’t been the grief, delayed by hallucinated daughters smiling demurely with eyes too dark for their age. It had been the abandonment. It had been the expectations that both Will and Hannibal had failed to meet. It had been the loss of what could have been and _should_ have been, sacrifices Will had asked for and Hannibal hadn’t wanted.

Even monsters can break. He hadn’t seen it immediately when Hannibal’s hand cupped his cheek, eyes shining with heartbreak and lips thin with betrayal. He hadn’t seen it when he’d stepped closer, cold and shaking and wishing for some form of warmth and comfort, some sign that things would be okay despite Alana and Jack and the fucked-up mess they’d left outside that moment.

Will had expected a kiss and met the chilling sting of metal instead. The only warmth that broken monster offered had been that of blood, his and Will’s and their daughter’s. The quiet of the stream hadn’t been quiet, drowned in the roaring waves of blood around him, in the broken sob Abigail’s last breath had been released as.

 _The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away_.

A god of his own making – nothing happened to Hannibal, he happened.

“It won’t be the same,” he says clinically, stepping back from the glass to create more distance between the two of them. Will’s eyes linger on the walls of the room, imagining the way Hannibal would paint them with Alana’s blood if he could. If Will allows it. “You’ll see it’s not the same. The unspoken knowledge will live with you like unwanted company in the house.”

 _Ghosts aren’t anything new_ , he almost says. _You’ve left me with plenty._

Instead of that, he tightens his forts, constricts the leash around his feelings, and spins to look directly in Hannibal’s eyes again. They’re both on the defensive here, tiptoeing around things in a way they never had before. As much as he hates himself for thinking it, he misses their intimacy. Their silent understanding. Will’s alone without Hannibal, just as Hannibal’s alone without him.

“Molly and I want it to be the same.”

That hits a nerve, he watches the knowledge register as a flicker of pain in those dark eyes. Hannibal visibly slumps, a relaxation none but Will would register.

The hands that had been arrogantly clasped behind his back fall to his side, pride yet again pushed aside for Will. Because of Will.

Broken teacups and lost time and far too much disorder.

_Not even in your mind?_

There’s a reason he’d avoided that question, and when Hannibal moves closer again, eyes wet with emotions Will’s own heart spasms with, he desperately wants to step back and run. _Hide_.

He’s frozen though, enraptured by Hannibal’s gravity. Long past the event horizon of Hannibal’s influence, consumed piece by piece to fuel that beautiful monster.

“When life becomes maddeningly polite,” Hannibal starts, words once again heavy with an undercurrent of longing, repression. “Think about me. Think about me, Will. Don’t worry about me.”

Space stretches infinitely between them, time unwound and ever-weaving and twisted as they lock eyes, as they ache separately and as one.

_Do you ache for him?_

Will’s only ever ached for him. Like a fresh bruise or healing scar. Like blistered skin or an oozing bullet wound. Like loneliness and loss. Like grief and devastation. He steps closer as time constricts, as Wolf Trap and Norman Chapel and 5 Chandler Square blend with the blankness of Hannibal’s gilded cage. Closer still as their words echo back and forth in his head, rejections and acceptances and betrayals and abandonments traded as flirtations.

The glass is cool beneath his hand, but Hannibal’s eyes are warm enough to drown the sensation out. They burn as bright as Fredrick’s body surely had, engulfed by the Great Red Dragon’s wrath, and drink him in like a man starved.

_Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you, and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes._

Will takes comfort in it, exhaling deeply repressed air, as though he can cleanse himself of Hannibal’s darkness so deeply conjoined with his own, as though he can free himself of the mutual culpability in Tier and Mason and Abigail and so many others. As though he can absolve himself of his sins and lay them at Hannibal’s feet like Alana and Margot have, like _Jack_ has.

“You turned yourself in so I would always know where you are,” Will says quietly, eyes flickering from the glass to Hannibal slowly. “But you’d only do that if I rejected you.”

The knowledge resounds with Hannibal, another echoed memory, a chair next to bed with a lapful of reconstructed teacups as equations and variables. Another echoed memory from before that, a kitchen and a linoleum knife and a family tied together through bloodshed and separated the same way.

He wonders how many rooms his imago pervades, in Hannibal’s memory palace. He wonders how the foyer’s colorings have been altered by his existence. He wonders where the origami heart sits, and if Hannibal’s eyes captured Will’s imagined caress, the careful examination of the valentine on a broken man.

_What was his offense?_

_He wasn’t you_ , Doctor Lecter offers coolly, because Will had known that from the moment he’d heard of the heart.

Hannibal’s eyes still drink him in, even as they fill with anguish and pain because he’s a practicing masochist that indulges in beauty of all kinds. Suffering is a beauty they both know, and Hannibal’s learned its pain at Will’s hand already. It’s a reminiscence to hurt him, and it’s an atonement to feel it reflect in Will’s own hardened heart.

 _Cruel boy_ , whispered through closed lips. Hannibal doesn’t need to speak; the sentiment reflects clearly in his eyes.

“Goodbye.”

He turns, eyes shut to drown out Hannibal, to ignore the accented whispers caressing his mind like a lover, to ignore the tendrils of influence stringing them together regardless of any amount of separation. Give and take, push and pull…

He’s pushed, so it’s Hannibal’s turn to pull.

“Will…was it good to see me?”

Good is an inadequate word to describe what this was. It’s everything and nothing and more and less. He wonders if Achilles would have lamented the loss of Patroclus so much if it had been a loss of time rather than life, an abandonment to the more righteous and stable pursuits. If divinity hadn’t been what stopped them, but the mortal hands of it. A soft woman with a warm smile, innocent friends that didn’t know the allure in blood and flesh and pain and inflicted torment.

He wonders if Achilles would have caged himself to keep his Patroclus.

“Good? No.”

 _Do you ache for him?_ Bedelia Du Maurier asks, icy blue eyes like a scalpel as they dissect him layer by layer. She sees him for what he is, as Hannibal sees him for what he is, but she does not delight in it. She tolerates, as Will had once claimed.

 _Yes_ , he thinks as the doors of Hannibal’s prison shut behind him. _I see him everywhere, in the stars, in the river. He’s everything that exists; the reality of everything._

But reality can cut just as painfully as lies can. Veils and suits are a protection he’d needed, a protection they need from each other. They are mutually addicted and resentful of it, hateful of it. They’re blurred once more, in each other’s hearts and heads and skin once more. Crimes aligned, agendas aligned…

 _Worlds_ aligned. But he can’t let himself be that person again. He can’t go back to what he was Becoming. He can’t be the same Will Graham Hannibal had coaxed from that chrysalis, baptized in the blood of Tier and the dark impulses simmering just beneath his skin. He can’t be the Will Graham that yearns for Hannibal like a missing limb.

 _Too bad he already is_.


End file.
